Chapter Seventeen
Ravi starts arriving to club meetings as late as he can without seeming excessively rude.
He does his best to never make eye contact with Yael, and she seems to do the same.
After each club meeting, Yael retreats to her office under the guise of organizing or restocking.
Ravi puts the library seating back together by himself and slips out before she reemerges.
He looks at her, though. During the club.
Whenever she isn’t looking at him. At the club closest to Halloween, she swaps the wooden beads on her braid for alternating jack-o’-lanterns and ghosts.
The next Tuesday, when Leo finally returns to the club, she’s strung it with wood again, but she’s gone for a dark stain, close to the color of her grown-out roots.
By Thursday, her roots are re-dyed to the same vivid burgundy of the rest of her hair.
She has a fall uniform of sorts—a long skirt or wide-legged pants, a soft-looking sweater cropped or tucked in at the curve of her waist, and boots that go just above her ankle, often with a heel that would truly make them eye-to-eye if he ever got that close to her again.
Something is always patterned, or textured, or both.
Visual interest, he thinks on a third consecutive covert glance.
In spades. Like she dresses to push the guiding principles of design to their limits.
Like she dresses to draw his gaze over every bit of her.
His first club back, Leo had avoided him, rushing out the door before Yael had even made it to her office.
But today he lingers like he did at the beginning of the semester.
His eyes travel between Ravi and the closed door of the library office, like he’s waiting for Yael, too.
Ravi waits for Leo to approach, slowing down his cleanup.
A few minutes after the last of his peers head out, Leo clears his throat and says, “Do you know if Ms. Koenig will be done soon?”
Ravi shakes his head. “I think she has a lot to do before she leaves,” he says. Leo’s face falls. It’s my fault, he wants to say. She’d be out here if I wasn’t.
“Okay, well…” Leo fiddles with the strap of his bag. Ravi leans against the table and folds his arms across his chest, waiting. “I want to say thank you for getting me home.”
Ravi nods once. “I signed up to be a SafeRide. It’s my job.”
Leo nods back. “Yeah, but … you also stayed with me and listened, and you didn’t have to do that.”
“You’re welcome,” Ravi says, giving him a long look. “Are you doing okay?”
Leo shrugs. “I haven’t told them yet,” he says.
“If you want to talk more,” Ravi says, “you know where to find me.”
“Okay,” he says. His cheeks turn red. “And, um, I’m really sorry for puking on you,” he rushes out.
Ravi laughs, and Leo’s blush deepens. “Thank you. Try not to do that again.”
“I won’t; I promise.”
Silently, they look at one another for a moment. “Alright,” Ravi says gently, “I have to catch my bus.”
“I’m going to stay and wait for Ms. Koenig,” Leo says.
Ravi swallows. She won’t come out until she knows the library is empty. “Knock on the office door after I go. I’m sure she’ll have a moment to chat,” he tells Leo.
Leo seems to accept this without suspicion, so Ravi replaces the last couple of chairs and turns to go.
YAEL JUST ABOUT jumps out of her skin when she hears the knock at her office door.
She’s resorted to hiding in here and doing jack shit on her phone after book club (today, sudoku and reminding Charlie to write her a plant-watering guide for his upcoming trip to visit his maternal grandparents in Hong Kong), so she reaches for the nearest stack of papers to make it look like she’s doing something resembling work.
“Come in!” she calls, her voice half an octave too high. The door creaks open tentatively, and a head of slightly overgrown curls appears. “Leo,” she says, surprised. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Ms. Koenig,” he says. “Do you have a minute?”
“Of course,” she says.
“I was hoping to catch you and Ravi before you left—”
“Oh, I could go out there with you.” She gestures at the papers that she was doing absolutely nothing with. “This can wait.”
“He left already,” Leo says.
“Oh.” Yael flushes, and she hopes desperately that Leo can’t tell. She tucks her chin to her chest, letting her hair fall forward to cover her face for one solitary breath. Their mutual avoidance is a lot less comforting when Leo’s in the middle of it.
“Is something wrong between you and him?”
“No,” Yael answers quickly, biting back the “why?” on the tip of her tongue. “We could both stay back next time, if you want.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Leo says. “I talked to him. I just wanted to thank you for giving me a ride home. I’ve never been like … I’ve never needed to use SafeRide before. I’m usually responsible.”
She nods slowly. “I’m sure. I’m not judging you.
I’m not condoning it, either, but I was in high school once, too.
” Not that she went to parties. The first time she got drunk was off leftover Manischewitz from Pesach on the roof of Sanaa’s condo building.
If she’d had to drive anywhere, though, she definitely would’ve needed the help.
“Hopefully this taught you your limits, though?”
“It did, definitely.”
“Good.”
“Thank you,” he says again.
“Anytime, Leo. I know you talked to Ravi a bit that night, and I’m sure he’d be willing to listen if you wanted to talk more.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking at the floor.
“And,” Yael says, “no pressure at all, but if you ever want to talk to me, you could do that, too.”
He nods, still looking at the floor. “I think my mom’s here.”
“See you Tuesday,” she says, and he leaves, closing the office door behind him.
Next week. Next week, she’s going to suck it up and speak to Ravi.
RAVI OPENS THE front door to the smell of stew chicken and immediately knows something is wrong.
Suresh never makes it on weekdays. The prep time is too long.
Ravi rounds the corner to the couch first, where Mia is sitting, jaw open, staring at the TV.
Another bad sign. Suresh only parks her like this, unattended, as a last resort.
She’s currently laser-focused on one of those Field Museum videos with the same woman, whose hair is braided this time, talking in front of a humanlike skeleton.
“Hey, Mia,” he says, and she only grunts in return.
“I think I have to take her to Eugene this weekend,” Suresh says, poking his head out from the kitchen.
“Why?”
“No natural history museum in Portland. Can we talk after bedtime?”
“Sure,” Ravi says, the unease in his stomach calcifying. He joins Mia on the couch, reaching for the remote to press pause.
“Dada,” she whines.
“How many of these have you watched?” he asks.
She holds up one finger, just as Suresh calls, “Three!”
“Alright, this is the last one. We can play Connect Four for the rest of the time until dinner.”
She crosses her arms. “I don’t want to play Connect Four. I want to be a curator!”
Ravi bites back his laugh. “You can be. You just have a lot of school to do first.”
“I’m very smart. I’ll do it fast,” she says.
“But not before dinner,” he counters.
“I don’t want to play Connect Four,” she insists, frowning.
“How about we play nail salon?”
Her smile spreads, toothy and wide. “Really?” Ravi nods, and Mia’s off, the video about—he checks the screen—Christ, the coevolution of viruses with humans all but forgotten.
She paints each of his fingernails (and much of his fingers, too) a different color, swatting his hand every time he moves. They eat their stew chicken and dal and rice, Suresh chatting about his day at work and Mia about hers at preschool, and then Ravi is on dishes while Suresh handles bedtime.
All the while, Ravi can’t shake his worry. Maybe it’s Dad. He had a heart attack a few years ago, but he’s been okay since. His doctors said he was healthy. But Mom would’ve called him if something had happened, wouldn’t she?
It’s alright. If it was anything that bad, Suresh would’ve told him earlier.
No sense worrying about it. He puts on the latest rough cut of the Lord of the Flies episode, which he is thinking of as untitled currently, because Elle’s first thought, “Who Does It Serve to Believe Humans Are Innately Evil,” isn’t as pithy as either of them would like.
It’s strange hearing her voice now. The flutter in his chest is still there, but it’s a guilty one.
Ravi relaxes into doing the dishes, scrubbing and drying, letting his ear catch on the moments where her pauses stretch or she abandons a sentence midway through. When he’s done with the dishes, he moves to the couch, and Suresh doesn’t reappear until there’s only a minute left in the audio file.
Ravi removes his headphones just as Suresh says, “Margot coming to the States.”
“Shit,” Ravi says.
Suresh sits next to him on the couch, looking straight ahead at the Roku screen saver. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“Next weekend. Veteran’s Day. I have an extra day off work, and Mia’s preschool is closed.”
“You gonna see her,” Ravi says. Not as a question—it’s clear that Suresh has already decided.
Suresh shrugs. “Don’t dam de bridge yuh have to cross,” he mumbles, sounding just like their dad.
“She coming to Portland?”
“No.” Suresh shakes his head. “Willamette Valley, touring some of the vineyards.” He pauses. “It’s better this way, neutral ground.”
Ravi nods, joining Suresh in staring at the illustrated cityscape cruising by on the TV. “So I’ll have Mia on my own next weekend?”
“I’m bringing Mia with me,” Suresh says.
Ravi looks at him in disbelief. “Doh make joke.”
Suresh nods. “I don’t want my … issues with Margot to get in the way of Mia knowing her.”
“Your issues?” Ravi asks, stunned. Suresh still won’t look at him. “You know she left Mia, too, right? She walked out on both of you.”
“Margot is a part of her, too.”
Ravi lets out a frustrated sigh. “Yeah, I can see that every time I look at her,” he says, and Suresh winces. “That doh mean you have to get her hopes up about her mother, just for Margot to leave again.”
“If Mia doh want to have a relationship with her later on, she can make that choice herself. Right now, I choose, and I am bringing her with me,” he says calmly. Resolutely. That’s when it becomes clear to Ravi how angry he feels about this.
Not just about this, even. About what Suresh said to him about family, when it became clear that their dad wouldn’t or couldn’t truly accept Ravi’s queerness.
Ravi had ultimately decided to maintain a relationship with their dad, of his own volition.
It seemed to him the lesser of two great pains.
But Suresh had made him feel judged for even considering cutting off the relationship.
It had been so clear that he never saw it as an option, that if Ravi had chosen to stop joining him on trips to Chaguanas over the holidays, Suresh would see it as Ravi’s fault.
That in everyone else’s story, he’d be the one who broke up the family, because their father had never explicitly said Ravi wouldn’t be welcome.
Suresh has never had a parent fail to love him as completely as they should. Even though the circumstances are entirely different, this is something Ravi and Mia share. And right now, Suresh is picking at a scab without even realizing it.
“You think I shouldn’t,” Suresh says.
“No,” Ravi says. “I doh know! But think how painful it could be for her. If she too young to know what Margot did to her now, she will understand eventually.”
“It would be more painful for her not to see her mother.”
“You might be right. I might make the same choice if I were you. But you don’t know that, Suresh. You really don’t,” Ravi says.
“It doh matter what choice you’d make.” Suresh clenches and releases his jaw. “She is my kid,” he says.
“Steups, why yuh stubborn so,” Ravi says. He looks at him for a beat longer, then stands up, walks directly to his room, and shuts the door behind him.
Later, Suresh comes knocking with an apology, but it’s for all the wrong things. Ravi tries to accept it, anyway.